I recently travelled to the United States where I visited Chicago for the first time. What a breathtaking city, with its beautiful architecture and the Chicago River manoeuvring through the inner city, it is definitely a place I would recommend people to visit. During my trip to the windy city, I found myself doing a lot of everyday math. Looking at speed limits in the imperial system as opposed to the metric system, filling up my tank of gas in gallons as opposed to litres, and even just budgeting my expenses taking into account the conversion rate of the American dollar, I noticed that people need to have a basic understanding of mathematics in order to accomplish everyday tasks. This week in our math class, fellow classmates of mine capitalised on this epiphany of mine by talking about different high school courses I was not aware of. The first course I would like to talk about was presented by a friend of mine, Kyle, who introduced the grade 11 Foundations for College Presentation.
In his presentation, Kyle introduced to the class different information about different banking institutions. In particular, he discussed the uses of debit cards and credit cards, something every student will be using one day. He first broke the class into different table groups, and each table group was given one type of card and information such as the interest rates, the monthly transactions fees, and benefits (if any) of the type of card. With this information, the table groups had to figure out the total cost of buying a TV, along with a scenario of daily activities one would spend on in a month. After the table groups came together as a class to share information about their card and which card or bank had the most efficient solution.
This lesson was extremely efficient in introducing to the student's mathematical problems that they may be facing at this time in their life. It will also teach students to take into consideration the different problems they have, and ways to save a lot of money that provide the same services depending on their expenses.
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